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Microsoft Announces End of the Line For Itanium Support
WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has announced on its Windows Server blog the end of its support for Itanium. 'Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 will represent the last versions to support Intel's Itanium architecture.' Does this mean the end of Itanium? Will it be missed, or was it destined to be another DEC Alpha waiting for its last sunset?"
How could anyone possibly have any use for servers that don't run Windows?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Does this mean the end of Itanium? Will it be missed, or was it destined to be another DEC Alpha waiting for its last sunset?
Kinda funny to make that comparison since the Alpha was killed to enable the Itanium. (Long story involving HP making a deal with Intel to hand over the last of PA-RISC/Itanium processor development to Intel and DEC killing Alpha at the same time to clear out the market since HP was in the process of purchasing DEC/Compaq, although the acquisition was not yet public at the time of the cpucide).
But I doubt its the end of Itanium. Itanium models have things that even the latest Xeons don't in terms of RAS. Most customers don't care about the level of fault tolerance and reliability, but the ones who can't migrate to linux (or Windows) because they are dependent on features of more proprietary OSes like Tandem (now HP) NonStop do need Itanium, and their software is unlikely to be ported to x86 anytime soon (it took at roughly 4 years to get NonStop ported to Itanium to begin with).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Microsoft has had a strict policy since the dawn of Windows that Windows be built for at least 2 processor architectures at all times. They really worried about i386-isms creeping into the kernel. It pretty much doesn't matter what 2 you choose, as long as it's more than one (and they're somewhat different), it keeps the kernel devs honest. I wonder what they're doing now: perhaps they just decided that i386 and "amd64" are different enough to serve their purpose.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No one can stop the x86 train, not even Intel.
Maybe not. But certainly some people are trying to strong-ARM the situation.
This is a response to my own post. Sometimes after uncorking a minor screed, I note to myself "that was more obnoxious than normal" and then my subconscious goes "ding!" and I get what's grinding me.
The secret of x86 longevity is to have been so coyote-ugly that it turns into pablum the brain of any x86-hater who tries to make a chip to rid the planet of the scourge once and for all.
For three decades right-thinking chip designers have *wanted* x86 to prove as bad in reality as ugliness ought to dictate.
Instead of having a balanced perspective on beauty, the x86-haters succumb to the rule of thumb that the less like x86, the better. And almost always, that lead to a mistake, because x86 was never in fact rotten to the gore. You need a big design team, and it bleeds heat, but all other respects, it proved salvageable over and over and over again.
On the empirical evidence, high standards of beauty in CPU design are overrated. Instead, we should have been employing high standards of pragmatic compromise.
If any design team had aimed merely for "a hell of lot less ugly", instead of becoming mired in some beauty-driven conceptual over-reaction, maybe x86 might have died already.
Maybe instruction sets aren't meant to be beautiful. Of course, viewed that way, this is an age-old debate.
The Rise of ``Worse is Better''
Empirically, x86 won.
The lingering question is this: is less worse less better, or was there a way out, and all the beauty mongers failed to find it?
The POSIX NT subsystem (and Interix, the user-space software that runs in the subsystem) have existed for a very long time, possibly all the way back to pre NT 4. The NT kernel doesn't actually use Win32 (or Win16, DOS, or Win64) system calls; it uses NT system calls,w hich are a superset of the functionality in all of those, plus the functionality required for OS/2 and POSIX. For example, the NTCreateFile system call not only implements the Win32 CreateFile system call (as seen in Win9x) but also the OpenFile system call (Win16) and the open system call (POSIX). For each API that NT supports, there is a user-mode DLL that translates the API-specific system calls (such as open(2)) to NT system calls (such as NTCreateFile()). These are then passed to ntdll.dll, which executes the actual system call (invoking ring-0 kernel code).
The OS/2 subsystem was discontinued years ago, but the POSIX one is still supported. From XP forward, it's been possible to enable the POSIX subsystem and download pre-compiled libraries, shells, utilities, headers, build toolchain (optionally using GCC or MSVC), manpages, and so forth to produce a working, if somewhat bare-bones, UNIX-like environment. Initially called OpenNT and now known as Interix, various third parties have provided additional functionality such as package managers (apt, portage, pkgsrc, or one specifically for Interix from http://suacommunity.com/ ), additional shells, libraries, utilities, X servers, and more.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...